1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology which is applicable and effective for an on-Internet information collection method, a storage medium and an on-Internet information collection system. This technology is one which is appropriate for acquiring detailed on-Internet information which is based on the condition of activities relative to information collecting technology on the Internet. In particular, the acquisition of this information in accordance with the present invention occurs when an original information collection client program has been installed and activated for an information viewer to view an information provider's WWW (World Wide Web) site, electronic mail, mailing lists, netnews, or the like.
2. Related Art Statement
The following is a description of the technology which has thus far been available and which have been studied by the inventors. The technology thus far available has related to networking on the Internet by means of computers. This networking is such that it connects on the Internet servers of a plurality of information providers and clients of a plurality of information viewers. This networking also includes such services by which information as well as electronic mail, mailing lists, and netnews and other such services are provided in such a way that an information provider can specify the WWW site address of a specific information provider which corresponds to an URL (Uniform Resource Locator). There are a variety of types of uses by which it is possible to use such services in the form of multi-media communications on the Internet.
The technology which relates to the service of information providers on the Internet as described above is such that it is possible for the information viewer to view the desired WWW site of the information provider by indicating the URL. The information provider is concerned about the condition of the activity of information viewer's access, and among information providers, technology such as for the collection of the access frequencies and such, and the detailed information based on such has been desired. The technology which relates to the service of information providers on the Internet as described above and which has been available thus far has been such that it has not been able to fulfill these desires of information providers.
For example, in recent years, methods for calculating the number of clicks made by information viewers on an information provider's web site and market research methods which use questionnaires have been considered as ways for surveying viewership on the Internet. The click counting relates to investigation into the number of clicks on this page, and the questionnaires relate to investigating by means of questionnaires as to what pages and companies gave memorable impressions. As such, these do not allow one to extrapolate detailed information.
Then the inventors of the present invention focused on viewers who use a browser on the Internet, on recording the condition of the on-Internet viewing activity of information viewers who were viewing the WWW web sites of information providers. After statistically processing all of this recorded data, the inventors devised a method of transmitting automatically the viewed URLs to collect on-Internet information based on the statistical results made possible by means of software.
That is to say, the inventors conceived an original program which is automatic. This program is for transmission of the viewed URLs. By activating this program, after knowing the WWW addresses, the genders of information viewers and the age groups of information viewers, and by following the actual pages, it is possible to conduct statistical investigating into factors such as actually how many minutes were spent reading which page. Thus it is now possible to deduce detailed information such as the pages which did not leave an impression, something that would not be possible to learn of through a questionnaire. It is also now possible to obtain detailed information which could not be obtained through the market research method of counting the number of clicks or through questionnaires.